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• Elastic and AWS situation with SSPL license change |
• Adam Jacob's discussion on business models and open source business models |
• The concept of a business funnel and extracting revenue from the top to the bottom |
• The idea that open source is not a business model, but rather a channel that can be leveraged for business |
• The importance of competition in open source, and how it can actually increase the value of the channel |
• Elastic's decision to license Elasticsearch and Kibana under SSPL and its potential implications |
• Adam's views on the Redis and MongoDB situation, and how competition from AWS and Azure can actually benefit the companies. |
• Rev share and assurances for partners running code as a service |
• Competitiveness of open source products versus proprietary alternatives |
• Business model and revenue generation through cloud services and partnerships |
• MongoDB's Server-Side Public License (SSPL) and its intended goals |
• Concerns over cloud service providers using open source software without contributing back or participating in development |
• The SSPL license was created to address the issue of companies providing open-source software as a service without contributing back to the community. |
• The license was submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval as an open-source license, but was eventually withdrawn after a lengthy and contentious debate. |
• The debate centered on whether the license met the open-source definition, with some arguing that it imposed restrictions on use and discriminated against certain users. |
• The author of the SSPL, Heather Meeker, maintains that the license was drafted to meet the open-source definition and avoid license restrictions, but acknowledges that the meta-issues surrounding the license's creation and purpose were not addressed. |
• The conversation touches on the concept of "ethical licensing" and the Anti-996 License, which imposes conditions on use based on labor standards. |
• The OSI approval process and the OSD definition are discussed, with some arguing that the criteria for approval have changed over time, while the OSD itself has remained unchanged since 2007. |
• Evolution of software licensing in response to cloud deployment |
• Critique of strong copyleft licenses, including GPL and SSPL |
• Debate over whether SSPL is "open source" or "fauxpen source" |
• Concerns over business risks associated with SSPL |
• Discussion of the implications of SSPL on cloud providers and users |
• Comparison of SSPL to other copyleft licenses, such as GPL and AGPL |
• Author's response to criticisms of SSPL and its requirements |
• Concerns about SSPL and Section 13 of the license |
• Elastic's licensing model and its relation to open source |
• Comparison with other companies like MongoDB and Confluent |
• Debate about open source vs proprietary and the motivations behind it |
• AWS forking Elasticsearch and Kibana and the implications for Elastic and the open source community |
• Open source licenses and their approval process |
• SSPL (Server-Side Public License) and its similarity to AGPL and GPL |
• Elastic's license and its two-part structure (open source and proprietary) |
• Restrictions on building competing services and the impact on OSD 6 |
• The holy grail of a single license for both free and paid features |
• MongoDB's BSL (Business Source License) and its implications |
• The tension between open source principles and commercial viability |
• Elastic's compatibility with other ecosystem players |
• Discussion of a "curious actor" in the industry |
• OSI's potential role in creating an open source license to address industry concerns |
• Fauxpen source vs. true open source |
• Benefits of open source as a distribution model |
• Manish R Jain's personal experience with open source and his decision to choose the SSPL license for Dgraph |
• Changing industry landscape and potential shift away from open source |
• Paul Dix's perspective on running an open source business with Influx Data, and their use of the MIT license |
• Comparison of Influx Data's business model to Elastic's |
• InfluxDB 2.0 switched to a cloud-first model for faster delivery and iteration |
• Open source InfluxDB benefits from vetting through cloud product testing |
• Collaboration with community reduced due to separate cloud and open source development |
• New InfluxDB IOx project uses a complementary software model with open source core and closed-source control plane |
• IOx allows for running open source bits alongside commercial product, with separation of data plane (open source) and control plane (closed source) responsibilities |
• Model allows for on-premise product to be added on top of open source software, rather than replacing it |
• Open core business model discussed, with examples such as DataStax and Google's approach to Kubernetes |
• Server-side public license (SSPL) and Elastic's move to it discussed, with Paul Dix expressing his preference for a different approach |
• Analysis of Elastic's motivations for changing their license, with Dix suggesting they're trying to change their business model to collect monopoly rents |
• Discussion of the ethics of open source, with Dix expressing his preference for open code and criticizing Elastic for trying to have it both ways |
• Comparison of Elastic's approach with the design of Influx's IOx (or version 3.0) architecture, which is permissive and expects competition |
• Permissive open source licenses can survive in infrastructure software, but producers must plan for commercialization. |
• SSPL (Server-Side Public License) is being used by Elastic to license Elasticsearch and Kibana, which is causing concerns. |
• The SSPL is not a traditional open source license, and its use is being seen as deceptive by some. |
• The SSPL requires companies to agree to its terms when upgrading to a newer version of the software, which can have significant implications. |
• Vicky Brasseur warns that companies need to be aware of their open source software supply chain and the potential risks associated with it, including license changes, security problems, and unmaintained software. |
• She compares the situation to the Equifax data breach, where the company had not upgraded a piece of open source software, leaving them vulnerable to attack. |
• Elastic relicensing Elasticsearch under a less permissive license |
• Criticism of Elastic's handling of the change and its impact on the community |
• Discussion of the motivations behind Elastic's decision and potential repercussions |
• Analysis of the business implications and strategic decisions made by Elastic |
• Advice for users affected by the relicensing, including exploring alternative solutions |
• Vicky Brasseur discusses her role as a corporate strategist and the complexities of licensing and open source software |
• She explains that her role goes beyond just licensing and involves considering the broader implications of open source software |
• Vicky Brasseur shares her blog post on the topic and thanks the hosts for featuring her |
• Markus Stenqvist, a Swedish web developer, joins the conversation and shares his thoughts on the Elastic relicense |
• He explains that he cares about open source software because it allows him to use and share software freely, without restrictions |
• Markus Stenqvist defends Elastic's decision to relicense and believes Amazon's actions are more problematic |
• He thinks Amazon's actions could hurt the future of open source software and that Elastic's decision is a necessary measure to protect their business |
• Introduction/Maintenance discussion |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's up? Welcome back. We have an awesome show today. We're here to get community reactions around the Elastic vs. AWS situation, and the SSPL license change of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elastic relicensed with the SSPL. There's a few people on this show that believe they went about that license c... |
In fact, Adam Jacob brought up the subject of Elastic and AWS on episode \#353 of this show. On that episode we talked with Adam about the war for the soul of open source, and the title of that episode could not have been more prophetic. To kick things off, we're going back to that conversation with Adam. For context, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about the business challenges commercial open source companies face. You said earlier in the call that things are thriving now, and we see Elastic and others out there thriving as well, that have been in similar situations as Chef. Talk about the business side of things for Chef. |
**Adam Jacob:** I think in order to really go deeper into this, we've gotta just set some ground rules for how we think about business. How I think about it, and how a lot of people in the modern era of software startups think about it is, in the smallest nutshell, you can imagine that you have this funnel. And at the ... |
The bottom of the funnel is customers, people who pay you money for the privilege. And what you're trying to do is get people from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. It's just "How many people at the top can I push to the bottom?" And there's a ratio there, where you want that number to be as high as po... |
There's a bunch more we could go into in terms of metrics, and recurring revenue, and all kinds of stuff, but the tldr there is people at the top, money at the bottom. So with open source - we talk about it as an open source business model, but that's wrong in the same way that DevOps isn't a job title. DevOps still is... |
The same thing is true in open source business models. There is no open source business model. There are business models, and then there is open source. And they're two very different, very separate things. There is nothing unique about open source and business. Business is business. You get people from the top of the ... |
So in open source, when we talk about open source business models, what we really are talking about is how do I create a channel at the top of that funnel, so people come in in multiple different ways? And we talk about those as channels. One channel will be "I'm an open source user of your software. I download MongoDB... |
Another channel would be my boss, the CIO, heard about Redis in the CIO Magazine. He tells me "You should use Redis." Now, I'm in a different channel than the open source channel. Or I get a cold email from a rep that says "Have you heard about Redis Labs?" That's a different channel. So we have all these different cha... |
So we have all these different channels that people come into our businesses through. This is true of every business. Again, it's not unique to open source. But that open source channel is interesting, because it's humongous. If you're a successful open source project, that channel is full of people, because lots of pe... |
And so when we're designing and thinking about our businesses, what tends to happen is we think about the revenue that that channel produces as belonging to us. If I'm the Chef people, I look at that channel and I go "Any Chef user belongs to me." And if there's competition in that channel, I don't like it, because it ... |
A good example here is if I'm MongoDB and I sell Atlas, which is their hosted SaaS product for MongoDB, and Amazon and Microsoft are both gonna offer MongoDB as a service - that competes with me to monetize the bottom of the MongoDB funnel. I'm MongoDB, I make this investment at the top of the channel, I expect a retur... |
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